Evaluation of scientific journals in human and social sciences

The paper discusses the criteria adopted from 2016 by the ANVUR – the Italian Agency for the evaluation of the Universities and of the scientific research – in order to classify the scientific journals in the SSH fields, in which bibliometric indicators are not used. In particular, the paper analyzes the decision to create a class of excellence for journals and to assess the quality of articles, and of journals, using the VQR scores. Besides, the paper addresses problems connected to the peer-review, the methodology proposed by ANVUR in SSH evaluation, and highlights the lack of international guidelines and ethical criteria in scientific research evaluation